The Internet is a vast store of information, permitting access to tens of millions of websites. Although the ever-increasing number of websites provide access to an immense amount of information, the sheer number of sites available may make it difficult for an Internet user to locate desired information. As a result, Internet search engines have become a necessary and valuable tool for locating information on the Internet.
Not all search engines employ the same search strategy. Some Internet search engines return a “flat” list of results, indexed according to a website's similarity to a user's query. Although these lists are useful, the vast expanse of the Internet has reduced their effectiveness. Other Internet search engines take a different approach and catalog individual websites into hierarchical taxonomies of categories based on the site's content. These category-based search engines not only return the most relevant websites, but also lists of matching categories that describe and encompass relevant websites in order to help users focus their query. In addition, these category-based search engines often display the matching category along with their hierarchically related categories in “category paths” in order to place the matching category in a proper context.
For some time, these categorization techniques were sufficient to provide search engine users with intelligible suggestions. However, just as previous Internet growth necessitated categorization over “flat” result lists, the Internet's recent exponential growth has limited the effectiveness of these taxonomy techniques. In particular, the rapid growth of the Internet has caused a corresponding expansion in the number of categories found in today's search engine taxonomies. As a result, simply categorizing websites and displaying category paths has become unwieldy and unintelligible, often resulting in tens or hundreds of returned category paths. Moreover, the lack of differentiation among the many returned category paths often results in logical redundancies and even irrelevant search results. Therefore, although today's category paths are better than their predecessor “flat” lists of websites, they have been rendered ineffective by the Internet's exponential growth. Further, the issue is not only the fact that there is too much information presented to the user, but also that it is not always possible for a user to determine which information comes from, or has a relationship to, sources that the user deems to be reliable.